"Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com> wrote: ...
Also, unless there's a guarantee that the random number state is initialized elsewhere, it should be initialized here, like it was in the now-removed xenXMAutoAssignMac function.
srand((unsigned)time(NULL));
Or maybe just initialize it once at start-up?
Could just add a call to srand() in virInitialize() i guess, although is that a reasonable thing for a shared library to be doing, rather than leaving it upto the application ?
You're right that it's not reasonable to call srand from library code. One alternative is to use something like coreutils' gnulib-style randint module. I'm looking into whether we can relax it's GPL license to LGPLv2+. Using it or any other library-safe random_r-like interface would mean maintaining and reusing an internal-to-libvirt random state buffer.